


long is the road (that leads me home)

by ichweissnichtauch



Series: roadmaps [1]
Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Actually this is Mid-Time Skip, Argentina, Character Study, Gen, Internalized Homophobia, Pre-Time Skip, also i cannot do math do not look at the ages and years i am begging you, probably, this fic is run on pure coffee and sleep deprivation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-27
Updated: 2020-10-27
Packaged: 2021-03-09 05:35:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,043
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27079693
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ichweissnichtauch/pseuds/ichweissnichtauch
Summary: He thinks about himself, deleting contacts from his phone and throwing coffee cups away without even looking at the string of numbers scrawled in Sharpie ink underneath, and he’s tired of hiding, tired of carefully treading the lines he’d drawn for himself all those years ago.Just this once, Tooruwants— he thinks he wants to be brave.Oikawa Tooru is not a stranger to wanting.
Relationships: Oikawa Tooru/Sugawara Koushi
Series: roadmaps [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1976386
Comments: 20
Kudos: 173





	long is the road (that leads me home)

**Author's Note:**

> title taken from _Cold Is The Night_ , by the Oh Hellos
> 
> for F.

  
  
  


` ` `

  
  


It’s pouring outside.

  
  


Tooru spins around on his chair, watches the rain trail its slow streaks down his window. From his desk, the tinny cheer of a crowd crackles out of the speakers of his laptop, and Ushijima Wakatoshi slams a volleyball into the opposite court, a streak of white-on-maroon on the dimly lit screen.

  
  


He finds the cord by the window frame and yanks. The shutter snaps down over the glass panes.

  
  


He pauses the game, checks his phone. There’s an unread text from Iwa-chan on his phone, sent an hour ago. He flips it shut. It’d probably be telling him to _go the fuck to sleep_ , or something along those lines anyway.

  
  


It’s half past one in the morning, and Tooru has a chemistry test at 8:40 the next day. It’s not like he doesn’t know that.

  
  


He reaches for his mouse, clicks the video tab close. Pulls up a clip of Itachiyama at last year’s Nationals. 

  
  


When his eyelids feel heavy and he slumps onto the desk as the clock reads 3:28, he will dream of an orange court in a gymnasium in Tokyo, and he will wake up the next morning and get dressed for school. He will scrawl a note for Iwaizumi in the margins of his borrowed notes, and it will say: 

  
  


_We’re going to Nationals this year. I know it._

  
  


` ` ` 

  
  


The ball hits the court with a resounding _thud,_ and Tooru doesn’t need to look at the scoreboard to know that they’ve lost.

  
  


The whistle blows.

  
  


Just like that.

  
  


` ` ` 

  
  


The sun sets at 18:47 that day, and will rise at 7:12 the next morning. The sun will set and rise again, and Karasuno High will face Shiratorizawa Academy in the central court of the Sendai City Gymnasium.

  
  


It doesn’t matter who wins, because this is Tooru’s unchanging truth: Seijoh will not be going to Tokyo.

  
  


` ` `

  
  


Oikawa Tooru is not a genius.

  
  


He sleeps at three in the morning, watches volleyball matches instead of studying for his chemilstry test.

  
  


“Oikawa,” his teacher says, disappointment heavy in her gaze, and he thinks, _please don’t say it, please don’t say it_ — “You usually do so well, what happened?”

There are people who sleep at three in the morning, who can watch volleyball matches instead of studying for their chemistry tests, and score with flying colours.

Oikawa Tooru is not one of those people.

  
  


` ` `

  
  


(He slinks into the gymnasium, papers crushed in the bottom of his bag.

  
  


He’s got his glasses on, the ones with the wire frame, and he looks an iced latte away from being called a hipster. It’s better than being recognised, though, here in the stands at the Sendai City Gymnasium, so Tooru will take being called a hipster over being recognised, here, as the captain of a team that will never leave this too-small gymnasium.

  
  


Still, Karasuno’s #2— the spare, Tooru thinks, unkindly, because Tooru is not _nice_ , he’s self-aware enough to know that there’s something ugly and terrible and mean, at his very core— the pretty one, he amends in his head, because Tooru’s not _blind_ — meets his eye from the white box, and for a while he holds his gaze, and the air feels charged with something, like ozone in the air before the sky splits open.

  
  


A whistle blows, and Sugawara Koushi steps out from the box and into the glare of the lights.)

  
  


` ` `

  
  


Tooru has always known this, ever since Kageyama Tobio walked into the little gymnasium at Kitagawa Daiichi.

  
  


No one says it, but Tooru hears it all the same, the way some of the underclassmen look at him. The sky is blue, the grass is green, Kageyama Tobio sets the ball better than Tooru ever has. There’s an unsettling feeling in his stomach, like it’s been flipped all over and bottomed out.

  
  


The _best setter_ award feels heavy, shoved into the bottom of his bag. He knows it may very well be the last he receives.

  
  


` ` `

  
  


If there was an award for trying, Tooru thinks, he’d probably blow the competition out of the water.

  
  


Because Tooru _tries_.

  
  


He graduates from Kitagawa Daiichi, the heavy gaze of a genius on his back, and comes home with bruised fingers and sore legs more often than not. He tries not to notice the way his mother purses her lips as he nudges their front door close, a Tupperware box in front of her, its contents long gone cold.

  
  


By the end of his first year at Seijoh, he wears his volleyball out, cured leather peeling, once-vibrant reds and greens washed out. 

  
  


That’s okay— he drags Iwa-chan to the sporting store after class, buys a new one with a credit card nicked from his father’s wallet

  
  


By the end of his second year at Seijoh, he wears his knee out. 

  
  


He remembers his mother crying in one of the hospital’s cold plastic chairs. It hung between them, unspoken, unsaid, a question she’s been asking for the past few years, lips pursed, brows furrowed.

  
  


_Why do you try so hard?_

  
  


` ` `

  
  


Here is a dream, time-worn, tucked away in a corner of Tooru’s mind: an Olympic gold, maybe two, Iwaizumi Hajime by his side.

  
  


_There_ is a glass plaque, fragile and insubstantial, the magnum opus of an unremarkable career. Best setter, it says. For a small town in the mountains, best setter means something. For Tooru, and the world beyond, it is not enough. Not when geniuses burning with raw talent have already run past dusty mountain roads, to a city where Tooru cannot follow.

  
  


Yet here is a memory, etched in the recesses of his brain like dregs of coffee in a used mug that won’t wash away: of locker rooms, loud and sharp and dangerous, carelessly-thrown words like knives on his back. Tooru knows the ugly shape of those words, thrown with malice from the other side of the net, tossed about _without_ on the same side of the net, and sometimes— he doesn’t know which hurts more.

  
  


Here still is Oikawa Tooru, standing behind the gates at the departure hall of Sendai Airport, Iwaizumi Hajime lifting a hand across the glass. A boarding pass for a California-bound plane sticks out of his passport, and Tooru wants to yell, _stay_.

  
  


But he’s learned to swallow these words, the edges of them all too familiar, lodged in his throat like they have been for the past ten years or so.

  
  


He waves a hand back.

  
  


` ` `

  
  


Tooru is not a stranger to wanting.

  
  


In Miyagi, he watches the easy way Kageyama Tobio and Hinata Shoyou lean into each other’s spaces, just an inch too close to pass off as a _just friends_ kind of thing.

  
  


In San Juan, two girls pass him by in the traffic of the crowd, colourful pins on their satchels, hands in each other’s pockets. Two guys had run into the bus-stop he was at the other day, ducked in from the rain with their clothes soaked through. They laced their hands together, laughing, and Tooru had looked away.

  
  


Something ugly gnaws at the pit of his belly, and Tooru _wants_.

  
  


He curls his hand on the arms of men in crowded bars, lets them buy him a drink and take him home for the night, a good-looking stranger from a foreign land, a good-looking stranger whose face is just one in the crowd in this strange, alien country of theirs.

  
  


There’s an impermanence to this, though, a ticking time bomb with a fuse that shortens with every game he wins in the Liga. No one bats an eye at him on these streets, not yet, but they will, and word will get around, eventually, and Tooru cannot afford that— not if he wants to play in V1 some day. 

  
  


Not if he wants to go home.

  
  


` ` `

  
  


Mattsun calls, on a Saturday evening, the familiar dial-tone of Skype echoing around his apartment. Tooru dumps the takeout boxes in the trash and grabs a bottle of cola from the fridge, sinks onto his couch with his laptop propped on the armrest.

  
  


They make idle talk while _Drag Race_ plays in the background. It’s tradition, of sorts— Iwa and Makki had double period Biology before Friday practice, and they had time to kill and English to brush up on— at least, that’s what Mattsun had said, when he’d popped on Season 5 for the first time. Tooru’s half-sure that they both watch it for the drama, because _hoe_ and _shade_ were probably never going to come out on the TOEFL tests they were sitting that summer, but potato, po _ta_ to.

  
  


Outside his window, the sun sets slowly over the city, and Mattsun asks, carefully: “Do you still have a thing for Iwaizumi?”

  
  


Tooru startles out a laugh.

  
  


For someone who may get teased for needing glasses a lot, he’s not _blind_. He sees how the other boys would sneak glances at Iwa-chan in the locker room, sometimes. He gets it. 

  
  


“I think,” he says, carefully, at last, “we all had a thing for Iwa-chan.”

  
  


Mattsun coughs, a little awkwardly. “Yeah, but.”

  
  


Tooru sighs. Doesn’t know what to say. Sighs again. “I don’t— I don’t think I really liked him,” he starts, “like that.”

  
  


“I think I always knew, that I was, you know.” _Gay. Bi. Not-straight._ Whatever. It still feels taboo, calling himself that, and Tooru scrubs a hand over his face. “But I never felt like, like— like I could be that, and I think a selfish part of me just liked him because— because it was _Iwa-chan_.”

  
  


He’s rambling here, he knows, but Mattsun merely pauses the episode, and Tooru just— lets it all loose, like— “It’s always been so easy, loving him, because he’s my best friend— and it’s— maybe if I kept liking just him then I wouldn’t fall in love, _really_ fall in love with a boy someday, and have _him_ call me a freak, because at least if it was Iwa-chan he wouldn’t say stuff like that, you know?”

  
  


And it feels— it feels _good_ , saying all that out loud. Mattsun’s quiet for a moment, and then Tooru eyes his screen, finally notices the little Godzilla patch on his shirt. _No way_.

  
  


“Issei Matsukawa,” Tooru says, not without a little bit of glee, “Is that Iwaizumi Hajime’s _shirt_?”

  
  


He goes bright red, and Tooru tries not to laugh. “Me and Makki and Iwa are,” he says, haltingly, “—working things out.” He meets Tooru’s eyes, a little guiltily. “You know you’re still his best friend, right?”

  
  


_Oh_. 

  
  


Tooru— Tooru’s _touched_ , is what it is. They’re each in their own corner of the world now, him in San Juan and Makki in London and Mattsun and Iwaizumi in the States. And he’s _lonely_ , is what it is. The team invites him to lunches and dinners and barbeques, but it’s not quite the same— not quite like it was, back in Seijoh. And yet— and yet Makki still Snaps him dumb memes, and Mattsun still watches _Drag Race_ with him on weekends, and Iwaizumi calls and texts and emails him to drink his protein shakes, _god damn it, asshole_ , _you can’t fucking die in shitty Argentina because I can’t speak fucking Spanish so how the fuck am I supposed to collect your dead body then._

  
  


And Tooru cannot, for the life of him, figure out why they’re still sticking around, when they didn’t _have_ to, just like how Mattsun doesn’t have to tell him _this_ , too. 

  
  


“I know,” Tooru says, instead, throws him his smuggest grin. “Who’d he yell at like an emotionally stunted loser, if not me?”

  
  


Mattsun lifts a brow, lips twitching. “You’re not— mad?”

  
  


“I’ve been seeing other people too, you know,” Tooru tells him, and then, loftily, “I’ve got _game._ ”

  
  


And it’s a little insulting, the way Mattsun guffaws at him, but Tooru will take it. “You’ve got hoes,” he deadpans.

  
  


“In different area codes,” Tooru says back, the way they used to, and they’re both cracking up, and it’s like summer at the old konbini behind Seijoh once again, and Tooru feels lighter than he has in days.

  
  


“Seriously though.” He settles back into his couch as Mattsun unfreezes the screen, Kim Chi walking down the runway in red heels that are like, a bajillion sizes too large. “If Iwa-chan breaks your heart, or Makki’s, I’ll break his vintage Godzilla figurines. The ones in a glass case on his old desk. His mom’ll let me in.”

  
  


` ` `

  
  


The whistle blows, and Club Atletico is out of the finals, a hair’s breadth away from clinching the championship title. 

  
  


Just like that. Tooru feels like hitting something— scream, cry, _anything_ , to quell the all too familiar ache between his chest.

  
  


Marcos and Emil drag him on a road trip to Rio instead.

  
  


(“No suds—” 

  
  


“ _Sads_!” yells Emil.

  
  


“—in my car,” Marcos tells him very solemnly. “No volleyball, just— how you say— chilling. Three bros, chilling.”)

  
  


Emil is from the southern coast of Italy, and somehow speaks worse Spanish than Tooru. Marcos is starting his first, real season in the Liga— just like the two of them— and likes to yell “ _rookie road trip!_ ” whenever they hit the road again after a pit stop.

  
  


It’s not Seijoh, but it’s something.

  
  


` ` `

  
  


“Look, this is my Rafi,” Emil says, proudly, and shoves his phone in Tooru’s face, a picture of himself on the phone of his screen, sprawled awkwardly on the lap of a boy who’s hiding his grin in his neck. 

  
  


Emil in the present is draped over Tooru’s shoulder, wearing the same pink shirt the boy was wearing in the picture. 

  
  


“He’s out of your league,” Tooru tells him, poking his tongue out at him. They’re at some outdoor bar on some beach in Rio, and Marcos is shoving a cocktail in both of their hands. Emil sets his phone on the bartop and flips him the bird with his free hand, and Tooru looks over at the beach, snorting.

  
  


It’s sudden, a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment, but Tooru catches a shock of orange hair on the beach anyway, tucked beneath a cap, and—

  
  


“Shrimpy?” he calls.

  
  


Hinata Shoyou whips his head around, flashes him a sunny smile as he waves him over with a well-toned arm. “The Grand King!” he crows.

  
  


Emil and Marcos are staring at him.

  
  


“What’re you doing here?” Hinata asks, as he makes his way to them.

  
  


Tooru wants to laugh. On the other side of the world? 

  
  


_Running away,_ he wants to say.

  
  


He crosses his arms instead. “I could ask you the same question.”

  
  


“Beach volleyball,” Shoyou tells Tooru, light enough, and all too seriously to be a joke. Huh.

  
  


` ` `

  
  


Pause; rewind.

  
  


Here is the thing: Oikawa Tooru is twenty going on twenty-one, and he’s spent all of two birthdays and two New Years and a Christmas in Argentina.

  
  


He calls his mother on Saturdays, and tries to ignore the guilt in the pit of his stomach for every _next time_ he tells her, every excuse he makes. _Are you happy there_ , she asks, every time. And every time, Tooru tells her a half-truth: _yes_. 

  
  


The truth is this: Miyagi had been suffocating, with all its tiny pavements and the neighbours with their pitying gazes, so when the email from San Juan had come when it did, nestled between the Google Alerts proclaiming yet another win for the Japan U-18 team, it’d been a lifeline Tooru had grasped— grasped, and followed back to the other side of the world. 

  
  


The first year, he makes it out of training camp with a chip on his shoulder and a place on the roster, second-string, but a lifeline still. He spends his first Christmas and New Year alone, the only other person at optional practice besides Marcos, the sounds of the ball on the court echoing in the empty arena.

  
  


Then their starter had taken a ball to the face, got a fucking _eye injury_ , of all things, and there he was, centre-stage, a crowd of blue hollering his name— it was the wrong shade of blue, the wrong cheers and sounds— but Tooru grasps the gift-horse by the reins and wins _Best Rookie_ , wins _Best Setter_. Alejandro Flores enters the locker room as San Juan’s setter one last time, puts his heavy hands on Tooru’s shoulder and tells him, _you’re the future of this franchise now, Tooru._

  
  


He wins his first point, his first _true_ point, in San Juan blue, with Emilio Bianchi— an Italian import, a starter right from his first camp— who sends it over the other side of the net with a pretty cross and drags him to the bar right after. _This is our year, Tooru, I can feel it in my bone of bones_ , he’d said, in that lilting accent of his, beer sloshing over his mug when Marcos had slapped him up the head.

  
  


_Don’t fucking jinx us_ , he’d said, but he’d looked at Tooru over the top of Emil’s head all the same, cool steel in those dark eyes, and Tooru had known, then, that Marcos— who’d been with Tooru on the same second string, who’d been there, those lonely practices that spanned Christmas and New Year— believed it too.

  
  


And then they made playoffs— they were winning, and they were winning again, and _again_ , and halfway through the semi-finals, Tooru had started to believe.

  
  


But the whistle had blown, and the ball was on the wrong side of the court, and it was over.

Just like that.

  
  


And Tooru, for all his worthless pride, cannot go back to Miyagi like this, tail between his legs. Not without an award that actually _mattered_.

  
  


` ` `

  
  


He badgers Hinata into getting dinner with him.

  
  


It’s been seventeen months since Tooru’s spoken Japanese, and heard it spoken back to him without it having to filter through the speakers of his phone, so when Hinata asks him to the beach, a Molten ball with all-too familiar colours and unfamiliar stiching tucked under his arm, Tooru can’t think of anything other than saying, _yeah, sure_.

  
  


Volleyball on the sand, though, is the same. _Same_ same, but different, in a sense. And it’s like, Tooru remembers Makki sending a shitpost to the groupchat, something about a man who’d shifted all of his roommate’s furniture just an inch to the left, and feels just like what that roommate probably would’ve felt.

  
  


Here, it feels like everything’s his enemy— the wind, the sun, the sand.

  
  


But the sand isn’t as hard as the salonpas courts he’s used to, either. It’s softer, less punishing, when he flubs a jump in a way he hasn’t in ten years. 

  
  


For once, his hands are still red from the game, but his knee barely aches.

  
  


` ` `

  
  


Hinata— who is now _Shoyou_ — hugs him tight, and then he’s off.

  
  


Emil wraps a hand around his wrist, drags Tooru to some fusion pizzeria that’s _absolutely_ disgusting, you have to try it Tooru, oh my god.

  
  


They bar hop their way through Brazil, and then back to Argentina. Marcos and Tooru buy ugly souvenir shirt after ugly souvenir shirt, and Emil yells along to Britney Spears while bouncing around in the backseat of the car. It’s the most fun Tooru’s had in a while, a whole stretch of mornings where he can get away with waking up at nine and not drinking his protein shakes and lying to Iwa about it anyway. 

  
  


It’s not Seijoh, but nothing will ever be close to Seijoh anyway.

  
  


It’s San Juan, through and through.

  
  


` ` `

  
  


Tooru stumbles into the tiny living-room-slash-kitchenette of their hastily booked AirBnB to find Emil huddled on the couch, one night. And it’s the way he’s _quiet_ , hands barely playing with the laces of his hoodie, a small smile tugging on his face as he mumbles something into his phone. It’s the way he says, _Rafi_ and _ti amo_ , softly, and presses a kiss to his fingers, gently touches the screen, reverent, longing.

  
  


And Tooru _wants_ , so badly, for something he doesn’t even know the shape of.

  
  


He trudges back into his room, gingerly shuts the door, and tries to ignore the low murmur on the other side.

  
  


` ` `

  
  


“Are you coming back to Japan for Christmas?”

  
  


The knife stills, and Tooru looks up from his cutting board. “Iwa-chan,” he pouts, “my cucumbers are all ugly and uneven now.”

  
  


Iwaizumi rolls his eyes at him from where Tooru’s phone is propped up against a succulent on the sink. “You’re going to blend them into a smoothie anyway, why do you even care if they’re uneven—” He narrows his eyes at Tooru. “You’re deflecting.”

  
  


Tooru sets the knife down, slides his cucumbers into the blender. The kitchen is quiet, save for the sounds of the San Francisco traffic on Iwa-chan’s end crackling from his phone. “Are you?” Tooru asks.

  
  


“Yeah.”

  
  


Tooru hums. “I want no less than three bags of American candy.”

  
  


Iwaizumi is saying something, and it’s probably going to be one of his health lectures, again, so Tooru goes over to the blender, makes a show of turning on the power and lets the whir of the machine drown out his phone. He smiles sunnily at the camera, and Iwaizumi barely dignifies him with a look.

  
  


“If this is about losing the championship—” Iwaizumi starts, and Tooru picks at a thread on his hoodie.

  
  


“Tooru.”

  
  


“Hajime,” Tooru whines. “Do we really have to talk about our feelings like this?”

  
  


Iwaizumi breathes through his nose. Does it again. “Your mom’s been asking _my mom_ about you. Your sister says Takeru’s going to Shiratorizawa if you don’t stop him.”

  
  


“ _What_ !” Tooru does not squeak. He maybe lets out a passable shriek. “Iwa-chan, you’re lying. I think I’d know if my own nephew was going to fucking _Shiratorizawa_.”

  
  


Iwaizumi levels him with another look, and Tooru sort of wishes eighteen years spent attached at the hip would’ve given him more immunity to an Iwaizumi Hajime look.

  
  


“You,” says Iwaizumi evenly, “haven’t been home in two years.”

  
  


Tooru rubs at his temples. “I can’t go _back_. Not like this.”

  
  


“Like what?” Iwaizumi cuts him off before he can answer. “Whatever you’re thinking, no one cares. The Liga championship, U-18, Olympics— Tooru, you can’t let some title define your entire fucking life.”

  
  


It’s a slap to the face, Iwaizumi Hajime’s particular brand of honesty, like splashing cold water onto your face first thing in the morning. And objectively— objectively, Tooru _knows_ the things he’s saying. Tooru knows, but he’s spent so long chasing after the ghosts of other people, measuring himself, in the has-been plaques and the would-be awards and the trophys that never-will-be, that he’s not sure he knows how else to live.

  
  


And yet— he remembers the beach and the sand, a volleyball in his hands. A lonely Christmas in San Juan, dragging himself home after running himself into the ground and looking at the too-clean dinner table, wishing, just _wishing_ , for a cold Tupperware box.

_You’re the future of this franchise now, Tooru_. 

It’s not a world title, _and yet_.

“Alright,” he says, “okay.”

  
  


` ` `

  
  


There’s a new konbini down the street.

  
  


Iwaizumi watches Tooru where he’s hesitating at the door, says, “Takahashi- _ojisan_ moved away.”

  
  


“Oh.”

  
  


Tooru pushes the door open, walks down the chips aisle. “Hey,” he calls, “they don’t sell wasabi chips anymore.”

  
  


Iwaizumi drops a bag of wasabi chips in his basket. “Dumbass. They’re at the other end.”

  
  


They check their items out at the counter, and Tooru winks at the cashier behind the counter. He flushes a bright red, and Tooru grabs the plastic bag and strolls out of the store. Iwaizumi follows him out the door, pack of beer in hand. He’s mulling over something, and Tooru knows not to prod at him when he’s like this, getting all frowny and deep in his head.

  
  


“Were you ever going to tell me you were bi?”

  
  


Tooru stops in his tracks. 

  
  


“I don’t know,” he eyes Iwaizumi. “That’s a big word, Iwa-chan.”

  
  


“No it’s not,” Iwaizumi says, “are you?”

  
  


“Are you?” Tooru parrots back, smiling his most obnoxious smile and pretending like his heart isn’t pounding out of his chest. It’s not like he hasn’t guessed what Iwaizumi has been doing in San Francisco, but they’ve never actually— talked about stuff like this, is what it is.

  
  


“No,” Iwaizumi says, and Tooru’s stomach flips over. “I’m gay.”

  
  


Tooru watches Iwaizumi watch himself gape at him.

  
  


“Oh. Okay.”

  
  


Iwaizumi furrows his brows. “‘Okay’?”

  
  


“Okay.” Tooru feels like a broken record. “I’m bi.”

  
  


There’s a stretch of silence, and Tooru suddenly feels silly. They must make an odd sight, two grown men standing in the middle of the sidewalk in the middle of the day.

  
  


A car honks, then pulls up right next to them. The window winds down, and suddenly Makki’s waving his hand in Tooru’s face. “Earth to the weirdos,” he drawls, “are we going to watch that shitty new Godzilla movie or not?”

  
  


` ` `

  
  


“Okay!” Tooru says, loudly. “My house, my rules.”

  
  


He points at Makki. “No searching for my baby pictures. Again.”

  
  


Then, at Mattsun: “No drunk pancake making.”

  
  


Then, at Iwaizumi: “No more than one Godzilla movie.”

  
  


“Most importantly,” he whirls on all three of them at once, “no icky icky PDA.”

  
  


Mattsun rolls his eyes at him, and pointedly pulls Makki down on the loveseat. Tooru puts his socked feet on Iwaizumi’s lap, where he’s flopped onto the other end of the couch. 

  
  


Makki pretends to glare at him. “He’s _our_ boyfriend.”

  
  


Tooru sticks out his tongue at him. “He was _my_ cuddle buddy first. And you have two boyfriends, don’t get greedy, Takahiro.”

  
  


“Your feet stink,” Iwaizumi glowers at him.

  
  


“Shut _up_ ,” Tooru squawks, affronted. “No they don’t.”

  
  


` ` `

  
  


Somehow, they’ve managed to form a cuddle pile in the middle of the living room. Like they were still juniors in Seijoh, Tooru thinks, disentangling himself from the mound of blankets. 

  
  


He trudges upstairs, and eyes the bag of laundry in his room. He’d been putting off buying a new washing machine, and his parents and sister won’t arrive back in Miyagi till Tuesday anyway. He grabs the handle of the bag and makes his way downstairs.

  
  


“Where are you going,” Makki asks him blearily as he’s taking his coat down from its hook, squinting at the clock on the wall, “at 2:17 a.m.?”

  
  


Tooru cheerily waves the bag in his direction. “Laundromat.”

  
  


“At two in the morning?”

  
  


Tooru reaches for his keys. “Can’t sleep.”

  
  


“You’re crazy.” Makki flops back down on top of Iwaizumi. He waves a hand lazily in Tooru’s general direction. “Don’t die.”

  
  


` ` `

  
  


The sign above the 24-hour laundrromat flickers periodically, but it’s there— still there, and Tooru stands on the sidewalk, watching the way the hiragana flashes as the cold winter air turns his breath into frost.

  
  


He pushes open the door, makes his way down the row of dryers to dump his laundry into one of the washing machines. He’s fishing around in his pockets for change when he realises there’s one other person in the laundromat, sitting on an upturned basket, fingers tapping idly on the plastic.

  
  


The beauty mark beneath his eye crinkles when Karasuno’s #2— Sugawara Koushi, his brain supplies— flashes a smile at him.

  
  


Tooru returns the smile after a while, slouches against the wall while he watches the display on the dryer in front of Sugawara count the minutes down.

  
  


Tooru pokes around on his phone as thirty turns to twenty turns to ten, before Sugawara starts, eyes still fixed on the dryer. “Our third year— the match against Shiratrizawa. You were watching, right?”

  
  


He says it like it’s a statement instead of a question. Tooru hums, meets his gaze in the reflection of the next empty dryer. _You were watching_ me, his eyes seem to say, and it feels like that day again, lightning in the air, the calm before the storm.

  
  


“I thought you looked pretty,” Tooru says, before he can stop himself.

  
  


Sugawara’s staring at him, now, brows arched, and Tooru fixes his eyes on the faded rainbow patch on the sleeve of his sweater. 

  
  


“If this is your idea of a joke,” Sugawara says at last, “it’s not very funny.”

  
  


But it’s not, Tooru thinks, and he thinks— he thinks about the girls in San Juan, about Emil and Rafi. Iwa-chan on the sidewalk, telling him, plain and simple and easy, _I’m gay_.

  
  


He thinks about himself, deleting contacts from his phone and throwing coffee cups away without even _looking_ at the string of numbers scrawled in Sharpie ink underneath, and he’s tired of hiding, tired of carefully treading the lines he’d drawn for himself all those years ago.

  
  


Just this once, Tooru _wants_ — he thinks he wants to be brave.

  
  


“It’s not,” he tells him, and Sugawara’s brows are lifting higher now. “I’m— bi.”

  
  


The sky doesn’t fall. The earth doesn’t split open.

  
  


“Okay,” Sugawara says, which is not a _no_ or a _that’s fucking disgusting_ , so Tooru takes that as a sign to continue, throws on his most charming grin, leans against the dryer and asks, “go out for dinner with me?”

  
  


The dryer goes off.

Sugawara gathers his clothes into his tote, before turning around to look at Tooru. He takes his time, and Tooru fights the urge to dash out the door with every passing second.

  
  


“Okay,”says Sugawara, finally, the corners of his mouth lifting into a grin. He takes Tooru’s phone from where it’s dangling loosely from his fingers, fiddles with it for a bit before giving it back to Tooru.

  
  


“See you at seven tomorrow,” he calls over his shoulder, before pushing his way out of the laundromat.

  
  


Tooru’s still staring at the now-empty doorway when the timer on his own washing machine rings.

  
  


It’s half past three by the time he’s putting his dried clothes into his bag, and the sidewalk’s frosted over, a sheet of white on the grass under the yellow wash of the streetlights. There’s a text from a _Suga ;-)_ on his phone, the address for what seems to be a curry place ten blocks away from Tooru’s own house.

  
  


It’s the middle of winter, but it might as well be spring, for all that it feels like a new beginning.

**Author's Note:**

> hullo and welcome to lon self-projects onto oikawa tooru far more than is healthy and banged out this whump fic in a fit of anger over yet Another loss and angsting over my last high school tournament - and then proceeded to forget about it for three months before slogging out whatever the hell all of this - (waves hand in the general direction of this fic) - is.
> 
> anyways to the soulmate and the people who came here for the oisuga but found none of what it says on the tin, i am sorry i Will bang out an actual oisuga-centric fic i capital p Promise. sometime between next month and the next century. yeah. haha. yeah.. peace, loves.
> 
> as always, i am fuelled by rage, spite, and your kudos and comments. please consider feeding your local starving boy! thank you ツ


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